The Ballad of David Markson: A Primer

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What is the entire sweep of Western culture, its greatest works and its creators, when you’re the only one around to remember or think about them, and even you don’t quite possess the intellectual grasp to think about them with much accuracy? Has any other work of fiction confronted those questions so head-on?
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Where We Write: The Merits of Making Do

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I began to suspect I was too susceptible to the idea of the “writer’s desk” and decided it might be better to do without one. Somewhere along the way, I began to work in libraries. More important, I began to get work done in libraries.
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The Aira Effect

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The effect of all the detail and incident César Aira can offer on such a small canvas is vertiginous, like reading an epic poem etched on a grain of sand.
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Writing Is My Peppermint-Flavored Heroin

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First gunshot of the day, 8:42 a.m. Lesson relearned by the end of the day: nonfiction book proposals are hell. Very long walk followed by tequila.
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The Way We Used to Walk the Dog

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Often, until I am directly confronted with the sight of a girl and her book—a sight outside the purview of my current routines—it can slip my mind that I, too, used to read like that. To love reading like that.
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A Harbored Notion

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It would be a pity should your books sink to the depths in the fuselage belly along with your neatly folded underwear. It could happen.
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On Repetition

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A contradictory set of truths about books and publishing in the abstract: don’t repeat yourself, and don’t write books that are too different from one another. Other writers will pillory you for the first, and publishers will be more than happy to pigeonhole you from the moment you achieve anything like success. Blow out your advance? Great. Now write the same exact book again.
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In Praise of Precocious Narrators

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In an age of shortening attention spans and the glorification of stupidity, I find it comforting and exciting to spend time with young characters for whom books, maps, notebooks, letters, research, drawings, imagined inventions and classic films are central and essential.
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In Search of Iago

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The comic sociopaths are so desperate to be taken seriously that they can never be taken seriously, and so fumbling and impotent in their attempts that you know they will only get themselves into trouble.
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The Beauty That Lies in Wasted Time: On Cao Xueqin’s Dream of the Red Chamber

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Dream of the Red Chamber's doomed lovers, Jia Bao-yu and Lin Dai-yu, are as iconic in China as Romeo and Juliet are in the West. It's also notable for its staggering length. At about twenty-eight hundred pages, the book is about twice as long as my copy of War and Peace.
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Literary Endings: Pretty Bows, Blunt Axes, and Modular Furniture

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It's tempting to imagine a linear spectrum of ending “types,” with tied-up-in-a-bow on one end, chopped-off-with-a-blunt-ax on the other. But really, there are so many different kinds of literary endings. What constitutes “satisfying” for different readers?
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To Teach a Kid How to Read, Teach a Kid How to Think

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If you have not been paying attention to trends in grade school pedagogy over the last couple decades, the first thing you should know is this: The way public school students are taught to understand books looks little like the way most readers of this site probably learned themselves.
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Orwell and the Tea Party

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George Orwell never thought that his work would outlive him by much. After all, he considered himself “a sort of pamphleteer” rather than a genuine novelist. Yet sixty years later, Orwell endures, and I am not sure that this is a good thing.
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Of Human Limitations

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There was a divide between the books that I wanted to read, and the books that I wanted to want to read. And the latter category won over the former time and time again.
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Reading in Tongues

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Where that translator emphasized, or rather extracted and highlighted, the poetic and romantic side of Proust, reading him in French showed just how muscular, how sinewy, Proust’s prose truly is.
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Evolution of a Reader

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Perhaps I look to books to protect me from life's ultimate highs and lows; maybe I am addicted to the parallel highs and lows books have to offer. I see the world through book-colored glasses.
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No More Lying: a Primer on the Novels of B.S. Johnson

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Joyce, Beckett and B.S. Johnson all tried to move the novel forward, to shove it out of the 19th-century ditch its spinning wheels seemed only to dig deeper. To tell a story, he thought (and often said), was to tell a lie, to futilely pretend away the chaos of modern existence and pander to humanity’s base, vulgar desire to find out what happened next.
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Writing Outside Realism: Aimee Bender’s Magical Power

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If reading Aimee Bender's stories was like creeping downstairs in the middle of the night to eat all the leftover cake with my hands -- that much better for the darkness, for the raw, guilty lust -- this new novel is summer afternoon, garden party fare.
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